Hi! So, I owe you about a million apologies, RL has had an unexpected twist, and I have been away from teh forums for... oh.. about a month!

This is NOT fair on you, so I am terribly sorry. Thankyou for takign teh time to enter the challenge though!
as it is, I have not reviewed everyone's stories yet - so results will take me about 3 weeks.. sorry. will be a present for the new year?
And now,
On with the review!
Firstly, I love the story opening. I think your real strength here is the characterisation of each of your characters. Tonks is great. Really, messy handwriting, but right on top of everything. I love the time frame you have chosen to put this story in so - I love hearing about the Aurors - before we got to know them in canon.
I am really intrigued as to where you are going with this, and what the issue with Clarke is.

There are a few typos/spelling errors and a few areas where punctuation was perhaps not used to its advantage. The paragraph
"She looked up at the Lion haired man as he stalked his way down the row of cubicles, clearly on his way somewhere important, he was wearing his good robes. Nearly faliing out of her chair as she turned to face him."

had a few errors ( eg - the last sentence wasnt actually a complete sentence, falling is spelled wrong, and the first sentence could probably be rephrased to flow a little better.)

Aside from the typos though, I actually really enjoyed this!

I dont know where you are goign to take it and its got me intrigued... Will clarke turn out to be a death eater? Is he undercover from the German Aurors, and suspects that Tonks herself is a spy, and is therefore running counter intelligence against her?
Will it turn out that Tonks needs to work closely with him? Will she meet Lupin at all?
Argh.. Im looking forward to the next chapter now,
I will have come back (hopefully in a week) with the rest of the reviews, thankyou so much for takign teh time to enter the competition, and for writing such a great story!

Anthea

Author's Response: Wow, it really has been a long time, RL catches up with us sometimes, dw bout it :D

Gah! I thought I fixed that sentence, must have uploaded the wrong version, bummer, anyways, tis fixed now :D

Oh I have several versions of what might happen with Clarke right now and I have no idea which one I'm going to chose, but have no fear, you will find out when everyone else does.

Ooh, I can't believe I didn't predict Max was gonna be up to something! I just thought he was gonna be getting in the way of her investigation or maybe be a love interest for her, hahaha, but this is way more interesting.

I loved the character of Alissa! So many canon HP characters have such strong eccentricities so it really felt like she was totally part of the HP world, while at the same time being really unique. I liked this line:

Alissa Frances was a little loopy to say the least, no matter how gorgeous she was and by all accounts she appreciated peoples' individual senses of style. A true ex-Ravenclaw.

^as a highly individual Ravenclaw myself, I appreciated this line ;)

There was the same issue with speech I pointed out in my last review, but it's only a minor thing that could be fixed with a really quick edit :D

This was so interesting! I can't wait to see what happens next :D But I think I read on the forums that you're putting this on hold for nano? Damn, haha, I'll have to wait until December to see!

Do you have an idea of how long this is this gonna be yet? I hope there's lots of chapters because this is really intruiging and I can't wait to find out what happens :D

~Maia

Author's Response: Hahahaha, not every guy is a love interest, and yeah, initially he was going to be just getting in the way and bugging her, but then a sudden idea occurred to me. So we'll see where it goes, but the fact that i caught you off guard has made me smile a little, so thanks for that.

I love Alissa too, a slightly batter potioneer, I may have to use her again, someone needs to be the Potions teacher in my Next Gen NaNo fic... Yes, her slight eccentiricity does ingratiate her into the world a little more, I mean look at Arthur Weasley and his obsession with muggle stuff, how can someone who is clearly making waves in the field of potion making not going to be little off her rocker, all the best wizards and witches are... :P Yes I love that line too, and the fact that she has pretty much every kind of tea on the planet is something that makes me smile when I re-read it too.

Well, I'm getting itchy fingers with waiting to start NaNo now and I'm working on this to make sure they stay limber and don't go stiff before it starts. So I may squeeze in an update before Friday...

Length wise, I'm not sure, I've not planned this very well have I? Maybe i should go back and do that. Hopefully It'll be about 10 Chapters, but it may be shorter or longer... That wasn't really informative at all was it? :P

Again, thanks for the review, hopefully I can squeeze another update in for you this week :D
LR
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Hiya! Making your banner really peaked my interest about this story and I also just entered in the someone else's business challenge, so I thought I'd come and give this a read. Boy, am I glad I did! I've not read much along this style before but this seems like a great start, really interesting. You're portraying Tonks so well and I like your use of other canon characters as well as OCs. It's really exactly like a snapshot into what life at the ministry would have been like, which is something we didn't get much information on in canon so you're doing a fab job of making it seem realistic.

There's only one small grammar error I noticed happening consistently throughout the story, and that's a really common mistake to do with speech:

"No, sir." She replied.

Should be:

"No, sir," she replied.

This goes for every time you use a he said/she said type thing after speech, because technically that's still part of the sentence the speech is in, so you have to use a comma inside the speech marks :)

Also there was one spelling mistake in the 7th paragraph down - 'faliing' should be 'falling', I'm guessing? Other than that your spelling and grammar was good, though!

Some of my favourite lines were:

She could point to a given snippet of information in a second (after tripping over her chair and accidentally hitting you of course).

Besides, what did it matter as long as you passed anyway?

Probably meant he'd be head of the department before he was forty, if he survived that long. She might have to quit if that happened, insufferable idiot.

^ I thought those lines all TOTALLY captured the essence of 'Tonks' and they made me laugh. Tonks can be a hard character to write, it seems like a lot of people reduce her speech to just saying the word 'wotcher' eighteen times in a row and leave it at that, but you've really captured her internal monologue perfectly. She's one of my favourite characters but I rarely read fic about her because of the reason I just stated, but I'm glad I decided to read this :)

Will review chapter two in a moment, as soon as I read it!

~Maia

Author's Response: Hey you!

The banner is gorgeous isn't it!!!

Thanks for reading my entry, will definitely go and read yours :D Yeah, i think, for me the hardest things about writing Tonks are deciding what life at the ministry would really have been like, and how they would go about dealing with a crisis like this. Hence where the timeline thing came from. Then secondly, keeping the clumsiness of the books without making her seem like a bumbling fool, I'm glad you liked the look inside the ministry, hopefully there will be more where that came from, and that you appreciate my efforts at the second.

Oh gosh, my English teacher is going to kill me! I can't believe I did that for the whole chapter, and I've probably done it in the second one too... oh botheration, I'll have to watch out for that, especially doing NaNo, got to reduce my editing somehow right? Thanks for pointing that out, I'll be sure to go back and correct all those at some point when I have writers block and nothing else to get me over it. :)

I'm glad you thought I captured Tonks' inner monologue well, and I love those lines too, especially the first one, i originally wrote it without the bit in brackets, but then that came to me and I was just like 'that is sooo Tonks' and I'm so glad I put it in.

I always seem to struggle with writing in acccents, I know when I write Fleur for example I tend to overdo it quite a lot, but I decided I was going to try and tone it down for Tonks quite a lot, especially as she's no where near as accented in the films, which, for me made it a lot easier.

Thank you so much for the wonderfully in depth review, constructive criticism, and your favourite lines, you've put a proper smile on my face. :D
LR
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